AMD indicated that its ATI Radeon graphics cards will not receive a Windows 7-compatible driver. The company says that its Vista-compatible drivers are still available and still being updated. The company also says that it won’t support WDDM 1.1 for Windows 7.
The move is the result of the company’s decision to end driver support for AMD DirectX 9 graphics cards. The current Catalyst 9.8 is the last available version.

AMD announced its move away from DirectX 9 in March 2009, in favor of DirectX 10, which is currently supported. The company says that Windows 7 DirectX 9 users should continue to use the Catalyst driver, which the company says it will update quarterly.

Maintaining Legacy Drivers

If the idea of maintaining your legacy drivers is troublesome to you, consider using a driver manager like Driver Detective. Even if you choose not to upgrade your Windows OS (now or in the future) Driver Detective can help you manage the drivers you need.

Driver Detective will locate, load and update drivers for all of the hardware you have installed. If a driver ever becomes corrupted, or is replaced by a newer version from the manufacturer, Driver Detective will discover this and load a fresh copy of the latest driver.

This ensures that your system will run smoothly and you can make driver problems a thing of the past. Driver Detective is one of the most trusted driver managers on the market today, and has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users who rely on it to keep their computer systems running smoothly.

Driver Detective can also determine when drivers are no longer needed. The system will remove or disable unused drivers to prevent them from interfering with computer operations.

Managing drivers can take an extraordinary amount of time. If you’re not a computer expert, or simply don’t have the time to unload and reload all of your drivers when you’re trying to troubleshoot a computer problem, consider loading Driver Detective and letting this fantastic software utility do the rest.

You’ll never have to worry about missing critical updates to your Windows drivers again. Driver Detective takes care of that professionally and reliably every time. You’ll always have the latest drivers for all of your Windows hardware. Better than that, Driver Detective can also help you solve problems before they start by identifying and replacing corrupted drivers immediately.

Photo Credit: Andy Melton, via Flickr